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Designing grid-based layouts in Photoshop is usually a headache as it takes time to calculate and position many vertical + horizontal guides.

GuideGuide is a free Photoshop plugin which simplifies creating grids in Photoshop with only a few clicks.

After defining a few variables (number of rows/columns, gutter width, etc.), it instantly generates the grid using Photoshop guides. And, for any active selections in the document, the plugin sets the grid within the limits of the selection.

Also, any frequently-used grid settings can be saved for later use.

P.S. Smashing Magazine has a very nice article on the usage details of the plugin.

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Mr. Stacks is a Photoshop script for quickly and automatically creating storyboards, stacks, and PDF(s) to be used in client presentations, CD check-ins. etc.

Just take any normal sized banner, define few options like the name, background color or "numbering to be printed over them" and your storyboard is ready. Afterward, they can be exported into various files types including PDF

Simply, it helps a lot in accomplishing one of the most monotonous tasks in art direction.

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Modular Grid Pattern is a website which enables you to create customizable grids in several ways.

The first one is a free Adobe Photoshop extension (CS5 compatible) provided which makes creating the grid directly inside the application possible.

Also, there is an online generator where you can mention baseline, gutter, module width/height, number of modules and the width of the layout where the application creates:

• PNG pattern (for GIMP)
• Photoshop pattern
• transparency mask (for Adobe Fireworks)

accordingly.

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foxGuide is a firefox extension that can display both horizontal and vertical guides on web pages.

The guides can be moved or removed just like the ones in Photoshop. Also, you can set the transparency and color of them for a perfect fit.

The extension has a memory which remembers the guides created per website. Even if the browser is closed or the URL is changed, the guide for that web page is stored.

foxGuide also works well for pages that have huge width/heights (supports up to 10,000px).

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Filter Forge is a professional and paid Photoshop plugin that comes as a pack of filters to generate textures, create visual effects, enhance photos and process images.

The better part is, it enables you to create your own filters with a visual node-based editor. So, there are unlimited possibilities.

You can share the filters created with the community (it is possible to get a free license by doing that.) and also download the 7500+ ready-to-use ones.

Most filters of the plugin support seamless tiling with a click(the ones you create as well), even for non-square textures.

Every filter generated is resolution-independent. They can be rendered in any resolution without losing any details.

Compared to old-style point lights, Filter Forge uses HDRI lighting which end up in more realistic outputs.

Besides formats like JPG or BMP, works can be saved in high-precision image formats such as OpenEXR or PFM which allows to retain every single bit of precision.

And, another great feature is: it can works as a standalone application as well.

To sum up, Filter Forge is pretty different than the traditional plugins by not sticking to several effects but makes possible creating almost every type of filter.

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Divine is a fresh & free Photoshop plug-in for converting Photoshop files into WordPress themes.

It works by selecting spots in design files & marking them as WordPress variables like:

• post title
• post text
• author link
• etc..

It produces valid XHTML-CSS code & themes are automatically widget-ready.

Divine has an integrated FTP-client & it is a very ideal plug-in for anyone who is not that into coding and/or WordPress theming.

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Photoshop plug-ins are the add-ons that power a Photoshop user.

They make a complicated task much easier & help creating amazing effects, designing faster & better.

There are lots of free Photoshop plug-ins which can fire your skills. This post aims to present  most of them (150+) in a comprehensive way.
 

How to install Photoshop plug-ins?

Photoshop plug-ins are .8bf files. After downloading a plug-in, simply place it in the presets>plug-ins folder of the Photoshop's installation folder (creating a folder with a name defining the plug-in & placing the plug-in files inside the folder will make it more organized).

Here they are:

AlphaWorks – Transparency Effects

A free Photoshop plugin for easily removing black or white values and making the region transparent.

It provides 6 different filters to match any photo type.

ColourWorks – Colour Modification

It has 20 effects to modify image colour values in several ways.

The plug-in can be used for digital-photo color correction or any other transformations.

EdgeWorks – Cool Artistic Styles

It has 20 effects to create dramatic edge and colour modifications.

This Photoshop plugin is handy for photo transformations for a highly stylized look & creating interesting texture effects

ScreenWorks

Easily create screen/mesh patterns with 30 options.

In one step, you can add small detailed and repetitive texture overlay effects to areas of your image.

EmbossWorks

The plug-in has helps creating various quick and easy embossing styles with 30 effects. T

They are helpful when adding a sense of depth or relief to an otherwise flat image.

SwapShop – Colour Exchange

Easily switch colour values in your images with 15 filters.

You can reach surreal effects by playing with the combinations.

MasterBlaster – Maximum Colour Toning

Use intense colour into your images with 20 filters.

Ideal for adding dramatic impacts to your photos or work.

Mezzy – Artistic Grain

15 effects to create simple grain and mezzo styles.

B/W Conversion

A Photoshop black-white conversion plugin with powerful features.

Tones of every color can be managed. And there are ready to use popular presets, an option to simulate the effect of color lens & more.

Selective Saturation

Sometimes using saturation may caouse some parts of the the images to be "over-saturated".

Using the plug-in, you can define a "saturation zone" and apply a saturation to only that area.

Local Contrast Enhancement

This is used to bring out the details.

It simply increases the contrast between a pixel's value and the mean value of the adjacent pixels in a local area.

High Pass Sharpening

This Photoshop plug-ing sharpens images with the high-pass method (high-pass is known as producing less halos).

Soft Focus

Give a soft focus effect to images.

You can set:

• focus softness
• overall strength of the effect
• blending mode of  the overlayed blured image.

Lens Correction

A plug-in for fixing barrel and pincushion distortions that are produced by most  zoom camera lenses.

Contrast Mask

It decreases the overall contrast of the image, helps bringing out details in highlights and shadows.

Gradient Blur

This Photoshop filter helps drawing viewer's attention to specific point by simply bluring other parts.

Xpose

A plug-in to adjust exposure.

Easily adjust highlights and shadows & preview the results.

DepthDither

It is specially suitable to be used on images that will be displayed on LCD screens which may show color steps in a gradient effect.

virtualPhotographer

With over 50 presets, this amazing Photoshp plugin can auto-apply combinations of

• film grain
• color modification
• B/W
• soft focus
• high contrast & more..

It also has lots of other free effects (click here).

AAA Options

It provides 50 filter options & 16 blend modes.

Effects are specially useful to be used on frames.

AAA Blur Options

A plug-ing providing Gaussian blur filter options (color blur & soft light).

Filter Forge Freepack 1 – Metals

7 metal textures and effects including alien-looking or industrial metallic surfaces, rust or aluminum foil, and more.

Filter Forge Freepack 2 – Photo Effects

7 photo enhancing effects.

Add sunny style, apply grunge look or color tints, age the image, and more to your photos.

Filter Forge Freepack 3 – Frames

7 filters for creating frames to your photos.

Some of them are: a realistic painted wooden frame or a vignette, a classic elegant feel or a ragged harsh look, and more.

Camouflage

Create an army-look with Photoshop easily.

The plug-in enables you to control 8 color layers including old & new army colors.

Night-Vision

This Photoshop night vision filter can make any image like night-vision googles do.

Images can be transformed to:

• like they are in a black-white or CCTV security camera
• an infra-red look

Snowflakes

Control all aspects of snow like sizes, amount & more.

By playing with the colors, you can even make them look like confettis.

Snowscape

Decide which areas the snow should fall down on by making the rest of the image transparent, then start the plug-in, configure how much and where the snow should fall, and SnowScape does the rest

Outliner

Easily get the outlines of an image.

It picks out various edges making them more expressive.

Dreamy Photo

Add a dreamy effect to images.

It gives a warm & soft feel. Some features are:

• Add Ghost Contrasts to images
• Offset Ghosting with Zoom angles and degrees
• Blend in Transitions and Ghosting

Mosaic

A beautiful plug-in providing various results of mosaic looks. You have:

• photo-realistic depth
• variable tile size
• color options

to play with.

Iridescent

Amount of reflection, colour strength, smoothing can be played with to create a pearl-like effect.

Water Ripples

With a 3D look & feel, the plug-in has several options to create realistic water ripple effects.

Jama 3D

Create corrugated and cellular like patterns from 2D images.

Making various bricks, herring bone textures or crumpled paper effects is very easy.

Lattice Composer

A deformation plug-in for Photoshop.

It produces a variety of weave patterns, fabric textures, body art tattoos and skeleton simulations. with extraordinary 3D text effects.

Luce

Control the light in all aspects to create stunning effects.

Stereogram Lab Filter

A plug-in for creating hidden image stereograms.

Mosaic Toolkit

Add mosaic effects to images.

It has several mosaic styles like: squares, rings, balls, gears & more.

Cell size and contrast can be set as well as the ball glow & brightness.

Smart Refinement Filter

This Photoshop plug-in has the following features:

• sharpness
• depth-of-field (DOF) enhancement
• noise reduction

Fur 2

It disperses a simple figure (a line, acircle..) over the image.

Kaleidoscope

This Photoshop kaleidoscope filter has 3 effects:

• Mirror
• Copy
• Blend

to get attractive results.

Sorting Tiles

Image is cut in several blocks, sorting of colours is done and they are redistributed as patterns.

Thredgeholder

Easily detect edges of images.

Chalkaholic

This Photoshop sketch plugin is a compilation of chalk and charcoal type effects with artistic panache and flair.

3D Shadow

Easily create different types of 3D shadows from any object.

All settings are present in a single window – transparency level, perspective, shadow color and position, X/Y/Z angles, and some others.

Photoshop Plug-ins By Graham White

Graham White is presenting 2 filter sets with a total of 9 filters.

The filters are:

• Bleach Bypass
• Blur Threshold
• Dual Threshold
• RGB to Grayscale
• Blur Color
• Blur Custom
• Channel Noise
• Channel Shift
• Plain Gradient

Sinedots 2

This plug-in can help creating wavy effects. And, mostly, you'll be surprised with the random results you get.

Shear

With several distortions, get a shear effect.

Retro Dots

Easily create retro dot grids based on selections. Simple yet effective.

Several Free Photoshop Plug-ins

A set of free plug-ins like ornament, ghost, solidify & more..

Blots 2

With 3 modes: normal, camouflage & gradient, this plug-in is very ideal to create textures using blots.

Color MegaMix

A plug-in to replace colors in Photoshop.

Simply select the source colors & the target to replace them.

Eraser Genuine

It enables you to erase certain parts of images by:

• asking you the color to delete
• asking you the color to keep

By playing with the tolerance, you can decide how sharp the erasing will be. Check also Eraser Classic.

Fine Threshold

Rather than the standard threshold in Photoshop, this plug-in has anti-aliased & sharper results.

Flat Median

The plug-in has few advantages over the regular median effect.

Flatness can be controlled, it is isotropic & effect can be applied both vertically and horizontally.

Icon Plug-in For Photoshop

It becomes possible to import & export .ico files with Photoshop.

It supports multi-format icons, transparency and semi-transparency and allows making icons, which are compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista.

The plug-in also supports non-standard icons of different sizes and color resolutions, including monochrome, 16 colors, 256 colors, 24-bit True Color, and 32-bit True Color with semi-transparency.

PhotoFreebies

A set of free Photoshop plug-ins to perform photo manipulations.

Plug-ins included are:

• B/W
• Desaturation Gradient
• Histo Fix
• Remove Transparency
• Sepia
• Luma Negative
• Chroma Negative
• RGB2YCC and YCC2RGB
• RGB2HSL and HSL2RGB

DeNoise – Noise Reduction

This plug-in has 4 noise reduction algorithms:

• ow-pass
• bilateral
• adaptive bilateral
• low frequency.

These methods can used separately or in combination to get the maximum result.

Harmonix

Play with 10 harmonic frequencies of a line to create waveforms of any kind.

Greyscaler

With 3 sliders, every channel can be controlled & there are controls for contrast, brightness and depth.

Technicolor

To create a retro film effect, apply this filter which imitates the old 2-color Technicolor process.

Beautifier

A plug-in for softening & enriching images to make them pop.

You can create flattering soft-focus, high-key and infra-red simulation effects.

Bleach Bypass

The bleach bypass technique is skipping the partial / complete bleaching stage during the processing of a colour film. This prevents the silver from being removed from the negative, and the result is a contrasty image with muted colours.

The plug-in makes it so easy to apply the effect.

Weaver

Creates a weave effect. An useful plug-in specially for pattern design.

SuperPNG

This Photoshop plugin is faster than Adobe's own PNG plug-in and saves considerably smaller PNGs.

xMeta

A set of 3 plug-ins for exporting metadata from Photoshop in raw binary form.

It can export:

•  ICC Profiles
• EXIF camera data
• IPTC press information 

Julia World

Julia 's curves are a family of mathematical curves (fractals) renowned for their beauties.

This plug-in is extremely simple : to track down an interesting curve, use the Julia control or press the random button (that's all !). Besides, it allows endless zooming, to customize colours, and to save settings.

Melt

Apply deformations on images with size, intensity, and aspect ratio of waves to get melting effects.

Projection

Using various perspective effects, you can tile images in infinite space (copy or mirror mode), or to repeat edges.

Posterizer

Add a poster-like effect to your images by playing with the luminosity and the hue

Autointerlace

Create interlace effects, just like a TV screen easily to create a techno look.

j2k

A Photoshop plug-in for reading/wiriting JPEG 2000 files.

Free Photoshop Plug-ins By Richard Rosenman

Richard Rosenman is presenting 24 free Photoshop plug-ins including:

• 3D Sphere Generator
• Color Bar Generator
• Grid Generator
• & much more..

Other Free Photoshop Plug-ins

• Plug-ins by Xero Graphics
• Almathera plug-in collection
• Filters by Filter Factory
• L&K filters
• BPelt.com's Photoshop plug-ins
• Plug-ins by Forensic Science Resources
• Topaz DeJPG

Do you know of other free & quality Photoshop plug-ins? Please share them in the comments & I'll be happy to update the list.

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Every web designer pushes the "Print Screen" button few times a day to work on the screenshot or just to find the color codes of a specific area.

When the whole webpage screenshot is needed "Print Screen" may not be enough.

Screengrab! is a Firefox plugin which helps you to get the entire page screenshot (visible area or selected area too), copy it to clipboard or directly save it.

It saves you so much time once you get used to it. You don’t need to plan for the perfect screenshot all the time, just get the whole and play with it using your image editing software.

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Creating icons (.ico files) inside Photoshop is not supported by default.

With this small yet easy to use plugin it is possible to import and export them with Photoshop.

In addition to Adobe Photoshop, the plug-in can work with Elements, AfterEffects, Premiere, PhotoDeluxe, Corel PhotoPaint, PaintShop Pro, Painter, and Photo.

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